Creating the Legacy XXI Institute

We came into being out of a clear and present need expressed by social service providers, dependent community members, and seekers of social enterprise opportunities to make a difference. The founders of Legacy XXI Institute separately and later, together, were called upon to demonstrate a new vision for altering the culture within which the social challenges persist. We recognized that rather than attacking the problem with more money, effort, and other co-dependent actions, something co-creative needed to be introduced. We owe to Volunteers of American, to a host of White House experiences involving education, aging and drug awareness, and to our consulting mentors many of our early opportunities to create test-beds for demonstrating that a culture can be shifted, that sustainability can be accessed, and that a self-sustaining movement can be triggered. We know there are many challenges in bringing the co-creative model into existing organizations that are still structured by a co-dependency model. We have often confronted the institutionalized culture that demands that all organizations strive to increase their marketplace for goods and services – even when that marketplace is measured by the expansion of human suffering.

Today, Legacy operates its own test bed in partnership with Volunteers of America Los Angeles and others. These culture-shifting initiatives give us access to creating our legacy. We seek to expand what is a rare opportunity into a movement of social cultural shifts. As Harvard University President, Lawrence Summers said, “One good example is worth a thousand theories.”

What is evident:

What we have learned has shaped and honed the Legacy offers. We have found that many organizations, leaders, executives and volunteers, have unsuccessfully sought to produce meaningful shifts in the social and societal issues they confront.  In many instances, their efforts have yielded an entropy of organizational and personal hopelessness and despair for the possibility of ever making a difference in the quality of life of those they intended to serve. Worse still, many among us have lost sight of the horizon of expanding human potential and settled for treating symptoms instead of diminishing need. In such circumstances, many among us have become as dependent upon the “victims” as the victims have become dependent upon the provider. Legacy XXI is creating new possibilities.

Today, we can demonstrate that:

1) The natural tendency of organizations to build marketplace and to default to market share expansion is a paradigm that needs to be examined if the initial good intention of the organization is to be realized

2) A sustainable cultural change/social fabric shift can be intentionally triggered

3) Cultural change can influence actions at the level of possibilities and choices in the lives of men and women

4) Enculturators, social entrepreneurs and volunteers can lead the way with minimal costs and maximum, meaningful, measurable paradigm shifting results

5) Volunteers have historically been used to leverage the on-going activities of non-profit organizations.  We can train volunteers as enculturators and social entrepreneurs to work in parallel with the organization and diminish the very need for the organization itself, which after all is the realization of most non-profit organizational commitments.

We are a 501c(3) Enterprise for the transfer of our proprietary sustainable cultural shifting strategy and training. We can work with your organization to lift a group of leaders, executives, volunteers and/or board members to a new level of empowered cultural leverage over the challenges they confront. We can make a difference in the access of those who seek to make a difference.

The spirit of the enculturators emerged from the lessons of professional work done over the past 30 years and builds beyond the realm of the intransigency of the “way it is around here,” the “stuckness” of tradition, and the informal reinforcement of “water cooler” gossip. The on-going design and implementation of the enculturator phenomenon is one of intentionally creating a momentum from buzz—to influencers—to fad—to trend—to tipping point—to movement—to culture. And, unlike the experience of corporate culture changers, this partnership begins with the knowledge that the leaders of the breakthrough will be, in all likelihood, redundant in the new social paradigm. We are not building organizations; we are sparking a transformative movement by focusing and amplifying the existing conductors of change and learned knowledge.

Legacy XXI Institute is pioneering new territory for confronting systemic issues. The rules of the path forward are yet to be chronicled; but, we do know that cultures change, conditions shift, new trends happen – we seek to initiate these results rather than to deal within the existing trends. We know that a paradigm once seen is a paradigm that can be altered, and for example, we know that revealing the paradigm of marketplace expansion vs. the paradigm of intentionally and compassionately reducing the marketplace rings true.

Our services are available by contribution and/or grant.

Legacy XXI Institute – and “the box”…